Turf Wars

“West Side Story” and “God of Carnage” on Broadway.

“West Side Story” (at the Palace, under the sure-handed direction of Arthur Laurents, who wrote the musical’s original book) is so exciting it makes you ache with pleasure. All the defining forces of the American fifties—velocity, mobility, confidence—are condensed into this superb retelling of the Romeo and Juliet legend, which plays out against the background of Latino-versus-Anglo gang violence. Like the tail fins on fifties American cars or the parabolic shapes of Populuxe furniture, “West Side Story” incarnates the dream of momentum in the golden age of the twentieth century. Everything about the show is streamlined: the fluid jolt of Jerome Robbins’s choreography; the exhilarating syncopation of Leonard Bernstein’s symphonic score; the bravura concision of Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics; the swiftness of Laurents’s storytelling—the book is one of the shortest in the history of the musical. The début of the show, in 1957—a production I saw—also marked the moment when the musical asserted its right to treat just about any subject (murder, rape, bigotry) as grist for popular entertainment. “West Side Story” is somehow both airborne and transcendent.

When a show succeeds, especially if it involves a collaboration, the story of its origins becomes the greatest fiction of all. Bernstein called “West Side Story” “my baby”; Robbins, to whom no one was speaking by opening night, signalled his imperialism over the enterprise by contractually requiring a box around his billing in every production of the show. Now the ninety-one-year-old Laurents is laying his claim to ownership: in this bold makeover, the story rules. From the musical’s first beats—which tone down the finger-snapping thrust of Bernstein’s signature prologue with pauses that allow us to take in the individual gang members—Laurents announces his intention to leave his fingerprints on the classic. They don’t smudge its beauty; in fact, his attempts to heighten the show’s realism only enhance it. In his version, the gang members actually look like teen-agers; the Latina chorus girls are not Broadway beautiful; the costumes (by David C. Woolard) and set designs (by James Youmans) explore the subtle, shadowy ranges of a color palette that takes the show away from glitzy spectacle and toward a grittier, more muted stylization. By eliminating blackouts between scenes, Laurents also adds to the story’s tension. The evening as a whole feels sculpted—no gesture, no word, no visual choice is arbitrary or wasted. Laurents’s most innovative touch is to have the Puerto Ricans sometimes speak and sing in Spanish. Fifty years on, in a multicultural America, this decision makes the production feel fresh; it also allows the show to dispense with some of Sondheim’s rookie mistakes. In “I Feel Pretty,” for instance, he had Maria, an uneducated Puerto Rican teen-ager, only a month in New York, singing with such showy internal rhymes as “It’s alarming how charming I feel.” (“When rhyme goes against character, out it should go,” Sondheim said in 1974, with the wisdom of years.)

It is Laurents’s great good fortune to have found for his tale of star-crossed love the radiant Josefina Scaglione, a twenty-one-year-old Argentinian, who is at once fine-voiced and sweet-faced. She is plausibly a teen-ager and absolutely a star. Unlike many North American ingénues, who are technically expert but internally vacant, Scaglione is a whole person. Passionate, playful, and demure, she sings out of a centered, secure notion of womanhood. When Tony (the excellent Matt Cavenaugh) spots Maria at the local high-school dance—one of Joey McKneely’s many sensational reproduced choreographic moments—he is instantly under her spell, and we are, too. Scaglione’s innocence and sweetness are underlined by the shrewd casting of the rollicking Karen Olivo as Maria’s older confidante, Anita, who is also the flamboyant, knowing girlfriend of Maria’s brother, Bernardo (George Akram), whom Tony accidentally stabs during a gang dustup. With such a sweeping canvas, the musical’s characterizations are necessarily two-dimensional; the actors must bring a vivid sense of personality to their roles. Here, for the most part, they succeed.

As “West Side Story” hurtles to its inevitable tragic conclusion, the audience is treated to astonishing moments of stagecraft. We enter the hubbub of the school dance, for instance, through a sort of hanging garden of paper roses. We watch the final playground fight through a chain-link fence that drops down between us and the lethal skirmish—a trope that both magnifies the authenticity of the horror and forces the audience to focus on the story’s outcome. When Maria discovers her dead lover, the moment is like a punch to the heart.

A rumble of an altogether different kind takes place in the French playwright Yasmina Reza’s dark and hilarious farce “God of Carnage” (elegantly directed by Matthew Warchus, at the Bernard B. Jacobs), which in Christopher Hampton’s excellent translation has been relocated from Paris to the comfortable upper-middle-class environs of Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. In a handsomely minimal haute-bourgeois apartment (designed by Mark Thompson), a turf war takes place over a blood-red carpet, a coffee table chockablock with art books, and two elegant glass vases overflowing with white tulips. Instead of the Jets and the Sharks, the Novaks (Marcia Gay Harden and James Gandolfini) and the Raleighs (Hope Davis and Jeff Daniels) face off over the loutish playground behavior of their kids. Michael and Veronica Novak’s aggrieved eleven-year-old son Henry has had two teeth knocked out by Alan and Annette Raleigh’s son, Benjamin. “Madame, our son is a savage,” Alan, a cell-phone-addicted model of glib Gallic cynicism, explains. “To hope for any kind of spontaneous repentance would be fanciful.” Where the upper classes of the turn of the last century fought with property, these vindictive twenty-first-century Homo sapiens fight with principle. “I don’t see the point of existence without some kind of moral conception of the world,” Veronica, who is publishing a book on Darfur, says. She believes, she adds, “in the soothing powers of culture.” In ninety minutes of sustained mayhem, however, Reza wipes the masks of sang-froid off her whole monstrous regiment and demonstrates just how thin a line lies between civility and barbarity.

Henry, it turns out, leads a school gang. “That’s terrific,” Michael says at the news, “because I had my own gang.” Spoken by James Gandolfini—forever preserved in public memory as Tony Soprano—the line gets a big, unearned laugh. But Gandolfini, who brilliantly manages his character’s arc from genteel to goniff, earns every moment of Reza’s fun. He is a huge guy, whose size is as imposing as the brooding melancholy that makes him a dangerous presence. When Alan drops bits of clafoutis on the carpet—“I have no manners,” he says—Michael watches him from the sofa in electrifying silence, like an alligator eyeing an egret. As events spiral out of control, allegiances shift, and fissures open up in both marriages. Lubricated by rum, Michael’s nihilism, like Annette’s projectile vomit—yes, you read correctly—is a “brutal and catastrophic spray.” He attacks everything, from marriage (“the most terrible ordeal God can inflict on you”) to Darfur (“Sudanese coons”); his fine fury is sidesplitting. “I can’t keep this bullshit up anymore!” he roars. “I am not a member of polite society. What I am, and always have been, is a fucking Neanderthal.” At some point, driven beyond endurance, Veronica, her hair bobbing, her arms flying, throws herself onto Michael’s massive back and pummels him on the sofa. “She’s a supporter of peace and stability in the world,” he says.

As Annette, Hope Davis is an elegant package of repressed nastiness. Her revenge is served hot: what she does to her husband’s cell phone and those luxurious tulips raises the stakes of farcical anarchy just about as high as they can go without someone calling the police. As Freud tells us in “Civilization and Its Discontents,” we have to repress our infantile aggression in order for civilization to survive. But it’s worth paying top dollar to see those feelings acted out by an expert ensemble. And no bleating about the cruelty of farce, please. As Reza knows and so gleefully shows, without a killing there is no feast. ♦

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